I am a faculty member in the Department of Informatics
in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the
University of California, Irvine. In 2014, I was awarded an honorary doctorate, “Doctor Honoris Causa,” from the University of Umeå in Sweden, for which I am very grateful. I was elected to the CHI Academy in 2013. I co-edit, with Kirsten Foot and Victor Kaptelinin, the MIT Press Acting with Technology Series which has many award-winning titles. I am a founding member of the ICS Center for Research on Sustainability, Collapse-preparedness and Information Technology at UC Irvine. I
like social theory, ethnographic fieldwork, and doing things people don’t expect me to do (like playing video games). It is humbling to have such wonderful colleagues, many of whose names are below as co-conspirators in various ventures.

With Don Patterson and Bill Tomlinson, I am teaching an online course for the first time. The course is called Global Disruption and IT.

Activity
theory proposes that consciousness is shaped by practice, that people
and artifacts mediate our relationship with reality. Consciousness is
produced in the enactment of activity with other people and things, rather
than being something confined inside a human head. Activity theory began
in Russia with the work of Lev Vygotsky in the 1920's, continuing through
his student Aleksey Leontiev, and then through students of Leontiev. This
work has been influential in education, organizational design, and interaction
design. Activity theory works well with design because activity theorists
have always tested their theories in practical ways and believe that application
is an outcome of theory, not a separate activity. In some of my writings
I have discussed how, as a psychological theory, activity theory can be
scaled to collaborative settings without losing sight of individual participants
in an activity.

Related publications

Appropriating Theory. This chapter in Diane Sonnenwald’s book is a personal account of my journey with activity theory. 2015

My
research suggests that a good deal of communication is intended to create
feelings of connection between people rather than to convey specific messages.
Affinity, commitment, and attention are aspects of connection. They are
active fields of connection between dyads that are constantly negotiated
and monitored. These fields "decay" or grow inert without interaction.
While face to face interaction is especially rich in ways to establish
connection (touching, eating together, making eye contact, sharing common
space, informal chitchat), people also establish connection through mediated
communication. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, email, chat, newsgroups,
listservs, websites, and games are especially interesting forms of human
communication that establish and maintain fields of connection as well
as allow for the exchange of substantive information. My most recent research concerns massively multiplayer online games. I am conducting participant-observation fieldwork in World of Warcraft , the most popular MMOG, studying how players collaborate as well as the relationship of offline, online, and in-game activity.

The
computer desktop was an amazing design for its time, but does not reflect
the complexity, flexibility, and sociality of human activity. Based on
my research, I have developed several designs that I believe would enhance
the desktop, if it were possible to take them past the prototype stage
and onto actual desktops. I hope the ideas will find their way into the
designs of others. Eventually we will have to reorganize the desktop to
reflect the complex mix of activities users engage in and move beyond
the rigidity of separate applications and files-and-folders. Activity
theory will be useful in this effort as we work to characterize activity.
While ingenious technologies such as blogs and wikis have improved communication,
we need better ways to use digital technologies to organize multiple activities,
establish meaningful contexts for different activities, and collaborate
with others. A different level of design and implementation is needed
to make that happen.

There
is a strong need to find new ways to think about the social and cultural
changes that come with new technologies. I have examined some such changes
with respect to the work of librarians and others discussed in Information
Ecologies. Our limited ability to predict change coupled with enormous
human creativity has led to a situation of instability in which systemic
effects of technological change can only be responded to after the fact.
In the current global economy we have efficient ways of distributing technology
but ineffectual means of addressing negative consequences (such as pollution
from wireless devices). New political and social forms are needed. Movements
such as green design, life cycle analysis, and cradle to cradle design
address some problems and can be applied to digital technologies. Social
changes are more difficult to characterize and require better theorizing. My students are investigating important topics in this area such as the use of digital technologies by the homeless in the U.S., and for women in slums in urban India. The ways in which we portray our digital selves are just as critical. They are fraught with the dangers of our preconceptions magnified by the power of digital technologies as discussed in my article with Yong Ming Kow on Chinese gold farming.